Exploitation Films

This week was definitely an interesting one.  We focused on the period where Hollywood went a little wild, and started to make exploitation films.  It was all thanks to the Paramount decision.  The decision essentially broke the hold the Big Five had over Hollywood and theaters to make room for more indy studios to have their time to shine.  However, even though they knew that was going to happen, nobody expected exploitation films.  Films that were light on plot and focused on totally cheap thrills and drive in culture.  These films wouldn’t have been able to change Hollywood without the help of a small studio by the name of American International Pictures, or AIP for short.  The studio was run by Samuel Arkoff and James Nicholson.  These two didn’t even have two pennies to rub together, much less actors that were recognizable or scripts that were coherent.  But they did have one edge, an edge that the rest of Hollywood was completely ignoring.  Teenagers.  That’s right, these guys made films that nobody else would.  Teenagers were misunderstood age group in this time period.  Their parents didn’t get them, and nobody was representing them the way they actually were in media.  More often than not, you would see a teenager dealing with problems in a good, clean way that was very family friendly for the time.  When the first of AIP’s exploitation films came out, it was a breath of fresh air for the teen scene.  These movies portrayed kids the way they knew themselves, and they loved it.  It didn’t matter that the movies were usually all terrible, in fact that was part of the fun of it.  But Hollywood was none too happy about the success that American International Pictures was getting.  When you have too much of a good thing, copycats will come around.

AIP movie were mostly cheap monster movies.  It turns out that movies don’t need to be good if they’re date night movies, they just have to have good scares and fun acting.  Everybody started to see these movies at the drive ins, and it popularized the double feature.  Sometimes, a movie would come out that needed to be followed by a monster movie.  A romance movie to get the teenagers sappy, and then a monster movie to scare them close to each other.  It was a smart ploy, and since AIP was making movies extremely fast, sometimes finishing shooting in as little as 5 days, Hollywood wouldn’t be able to keep up.  It was a smart strategy, and one that paid off in the end.  AIP also went on to make movies that featured African-American actors in what has become known as Blacksploitation films.  AIP was the little studio that could.